Cyber laws must punish individuals not society: specialist

November 17, 2009

Young people browse the Internet in a cybercafe in Abidjan in August 2009. Laws regulating cybercrimes must target individuals and not society as a whole, an IT specialist told an Internet governance forum at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday.

Laws regulating cybercrimes must target individuals and not society as a whole, an IT specialist told an Internet governance forum at the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on Tuesday.

Gisele Da Silva Craveiro from the University of Sao Paolo in Brazil said the broad nature of cyberlegislation leaves it open to abuse by authorities.

"Definitions for cybercrimes can be so broad as to fit everything... leaving the laws open to inappropriate use by authorities such as monitoring citizens," Craveiro told AFP on the sidelines of the Fourth Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum in Egypt.

"Technicians need to communicate with lawyers to come up with more efficient legislation so that society doesn't end up paying the price for too broad a legislation," she said.

Craveiro was speaking at a session entitled Developing Comprehensive Cybercrime Legislation organised by the Council of Europe at the Red Sea meeting.

"Legal frameworks should take into acount the rights of users and the role of the private sector on the one hand, and security concerns on the other," the Council of Europe said in a statement.

While broad legislation can mean the potential for misuse, targeting specific offences means having to regularly update laws to catch up with the meteoric evolution of cybercrimes, some said.

"You need to have a mix and match addressing specific offences but also taking into account new technologies and cybercrimes," said Pavan Duggal, Chairman of Cyber Law and IT Act. Committee in India, where data theft and unauthorised data use is posing the biggest challenge in cyberspace.

The Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime is currently the only binding legal document designed to criminalise computer-related offences, content-related offences and offences relating to infringement of copyright and associated rights.

The IGF forum in Egypt has grouped more than 1,500 representatives of government, civil society, advocacy groups and the private sector from more than 100 countries to discuss the future of the Internet.

Women who commit sexual offences are just as likely to have mental problems or drug addictions as other violent female criminals. This according to the largest study ever conducted of women convicted of sexual offences in ...

(AP) -- United Nations officials forced free-speech advocates to take down a poster over its reference to China's Web restrictions at an Internet conference focused on freedom, saying Monday that it violated a ban on posters ...

Recommended for you

Past studies have found that a variety of complex networks, from biological systems to social media networks, can exhibit universal topological characteristics. These universal characteristics, however, do not always translate ...

Metasurfaces are two-dimensional (2-D) metamaterials that can control scattering waves of a light beam. Their applications include thin-sheet polarizers, beam splitters, beam steerers and lenses. These structures can control ...

The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) was launched on April 18 of last year with the primary objective of discovering transiting planets smaller than Neptune around stars bright enough for spectroscopic investigations ...

A pair of researchers at Purdue University has found a way to use a diatomic Ni-Ni catalyst to synthesize cyclopentenes. In their paper published in the journal Science, You-Yun Zhou and Christopher Uyeda describe their method ...

Photocatalysts – materials that trigger chemical reactions when hit by light – are important in a number of natural and industrial processes, from producing hydrogen for fuel to enabling photosynthesis.

Neutron stars are among the densest-known objects in the universe, withstanding pressures so great that one teaspoon of a star's material would equal about 15 times the weight of the moon. Yet as it turns out, protons—the ...

0 comments

Please sign in to add a comment.
Registration is free, and takes less than a minute.
Read more

Click here to reset your password.
Sign in to get notified via email when new comments are made.